I find lately in conversation, whether it be casual or professional, my worst habit is that I always, in my mind, try to anticipate where someone is going in a conversation and then interject before they end their statement.  Not only is this just incredibly rude, but who wants to talk to someone like this!?  I usually try to temper my speech so that I do wait, but I find myself more and more impatient as people spit out their points.  But it makes me wonder why I’ve developed this habit?

I think to start with, a lot of my communication comes from either instant messages or forums.  Generally it comes in a readable response format where you have back and forth and even if you interrupt someone they can generally continue their train of thought.  It’s a less disruptive form since you’re afforded the ability to ignore someone temporarily and then respond.

My second medium of choice in the verbal warfare comes from ventrillo which is real time voice chat software.  So in real life, you’re confronted with people where you can see literally when they’re awaiting a response or if they’re pausing, you can see why.  For instance, someone saying something, then takes a drink or eats, this is a fairly appropriate time to interject.  However, it’s not perfect, and one usually akwardly interrupts often.  It’s a difficult medium when you remove the human element but still try to maintain the back and forth.  Eliminating faces and expression makes it hard.  I imagine it’s like a conference call gone bad sometimes with everyone yelling over each other and it becomes a battle of sheer willpower to not stop what you’re saying and attempt to be the alpha voice among all others.

Ok so translating those into real life makes me somewhat of a nuisance.  Where I can sort of jot down an idea, see if it’s palatable to the the conversation and then if it is, hit the enter key doesn’t work well in real life conversations.  I did this the other night where this sort of malformed idea came out, but then I had to spend several minutes backtracking it out loud to everyone to see if I could justify my pointless point.  Had it been via IM/text, I would have simply not hit enter and it would have never boiled over into some sort of rediculous topic.  Coupled with the fact that people are trying to disprove my notion before I finish with my counterpoints interrupting them before they finish where they’re going, it was sort of a mess.

I wonder though if I’m not alone though in a sort of transitory period of life where we migrate a lot of our interactions through text/web 2.0/etc..  I feel like the business sharks of the world will hold mastery over conversation while the masses will be dumbed down to text message styles of speech with “lol”‘s and “u r”‘s all over the place.  It’s interesting to me that American English is so far developed differently from British English over the span of roughly 200+ years that I wonder what our next evolutionary jump will be.